Pet Peeve - Do you or don't you?

[kien]

frag plugs and discs drive me bananas ! However, I do use rubble to mount my frags and then mount the rubbled with frag to my rockwork. I like doing this because it is slightly less ugly and allows me to easily move the frag around which I do frequently.

[lastlight]

Originally Posted by kien

frag plugs and discs drive me bananas ! However, I do use rubble to mount my frags and then mount the rubbled with frag to my rockwork. I like doing this because it is slightly less ugly and allows me to easily move the frag around which I do frequently.

I've done this to every frag almost. I consider it the same as mounting to the rock. My rubble bits are tiny (that is what she said - sorry I need one of those every now and then) and I put them on the rock so they blend in really well. You def can't tell they're there although currently that's because my algae is hugging a lot of my frags.

[Skimmerking]

See this I remember that someone here i dont know who bought a crap load of colonies and just like Brad stated glued them all on the rocks. Then in about 5 months put out there Look at my tank!! Look at how much its grown and doing well. then you see the plugs.

[Delphinus]

I see this as coral gardening. See, for me, I hate the look of frag shelves in a display tank. If all I have are little frags though then glueing those in place without the plugs, for me, has not been as successful in frag retention than has been glueing the plugs down. Snails, clumsy fish, urchins .. it is a conspiracy of pretty much anything that moves in my tank (including the water now that I think of it) to find loosely attached corals and remove them from their mounting points. So I epoxy the frack out of the plug while minimizing contact with the coral itself. Yeah, it means that I have plugs on the rock, but, 1) they get covered in coraline in time and it's less conspicuous, 2) in some cases the corals have grown over the mounts and you can't tell (no really, you can't tell. Maybe not that many qualify in this category but it's nonzero), and 3) in the very beginning of this thoughtstream I said something about coral gardening, the thing is, this is coral gardening and part of gardening is pruning and replanting and the like, if the coral does well over time then it's likely that it will get removed and the plug, if still conspicuously sticking out by then, can simply be removed and the coral and/or whatever frags can be remounted using other means (it's been years since I was at this point but I fantasize one day I'll have a tank like my 75g where I couldn't even give SPS frags away for free because the growth was that fast).

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

to find loosely attached corals and remove them from their mounting points.

you could stop "loosely" mounting them

[Lance]

Originally Posted by kien

frag plugs and discs drive me bananas ! However, I do use rubble to mount my frags and then mount the rubbled with frag to my rockwork. I like doing this because it is slightly less ugly and allows me to easily move the frag around which I do frequently.

+1

[Mrfish55]

I used to put them in as I received them ( plugs or culture bases) but have introduced too many pests that way, all new purchases go into quarantine till happy and then they are removed from the base they came on when they go into the display, any residual coral that remains on the base stays in the quarantine and is given away or chucked.

[Nano]

I hate it, I bought some zoo's a long time ago on disks, and now, I'm afraid I will be stuck with them on the disk. I much prefer to just get the cuttings and glue them myself, or have them mounted on small pieces of LR that looks more like it belongs

[christyf5]

I put them on frag racks if they're very small and allow them to grow a little (or a lot, sometimes they stay on there for months due to lack of time to mount them). For the most part they usually just encrust onto the frag plug which is a pain but then I whack the bottom off and epoxy it to the rock much (much) later. otherwise it usually gets lost in the tank as a small frag.

For the larger colonies that come on those chunks of rock I usually remove them and mount them directly to the rock. For some reason I can't throw the rock out so it ends up in the sump, spreading its lovely hitch hiker wonderfulness to the rest of the tank

[Arok3000]

This may appeal to some who don't like having to cut, trim, and mount their frag plugs.
Apparently you don't have to drill either, just find a small crevice and twist them in. It looks to be a nice small profile also so the frag has a better chance of seamlessly covering the plug and rock.

Found the info here:
http://reefbuilders.com/2012/01/17/reeftap-frag-plug/